The woman climbed out of the car and took with her a hefty stack of newspapers from all over the world: major dailies from the United States, Germany, France, and England through that very day; Austria, Switzerland, and Italy through three days before. Holding the stack in both arms, she moved in a fast walk toward a cottage isolated in the commune’s rear. The pair watching over the old woman today motioned the visitor toward the wrought-iron table where the figure in the wheelchair was seated, turned away toward the trees. She plopped the stack down atop the table and straightened it.
“I’m sorry for being late.”
The figure in the wheelchair did not turn. “Leave me.”
All too glad to do just that, the woman turned and was on her way.
This kibbutz looked much like the other self-sufficient communes that were scattered all across Israel. Large fields of crops dominated the setting. Farm animals were corralled in a number of areas. The squawk of chickens could be heard for a considerable distance. Cows looked up from their grazing to utter an occasional sound. Dogs sauntered lazily about or lay in the shade of large cedar trees and the kibbutz’s numerous buildings. Many of these were small, cottagelike structures that mostly held families. A number of larger structures were actually dormitories that housed the children. Still more buildings contained offices and classrooms for the children’s daily lessons. The largest was the cafeteria where the kibbutz members took all their meals. The synagogue could be found in the second largest.
This kibbutz would also have seemed at first glance to be like all the others in terms of the residents going about their daily chores and duties. Routine provided security, not tedium. For the residents, discipline was everything.
But a closer look revealed something odd about this kibbutz’s residents: each and every adult was female. Men were nowhere to be seen. In addition to that, this particular kibbutz enjoyed no formal registration, nothing whatsoever that provided proof of its existence. All mail was delivered to a single post office box twenty miles away to be picked up every day, or sometimes every other. To those in the government aware of the commune’s existence, it was referred to simply as “Nineteen.”
The women of Nineteen could call it home for as long as they desired. Many of the residents were war widows who came to escape the violent world that was the Israeli way of life. There was ample time to get on with their lives later. For now, their spirits needed to mend, and they stayed as long at Nineteen as necessary to see this come to pass.
It was similar for female soldiers who came to Nineteen with nerve strings frayed to the very edge. Though it had been twenty years since Israel had been attacked, and a decade since she had invaded Lebanon, limited engagements and skirmishes were a fact of life. These, too, exacted a price from those who fought in them repeatedly.
Still more of the kibbutz’s residents were widows as well, but of a different sort. Spanning the scope of ages, they had lost husband or children to terrorist attacks or the Intifada. They came to Nineteen with a rage that could be calmed but never vanquished. These would spend portions of each day on the commune’s gunnery ranges firing at black cardboard silhouettes they imagined to be the ravagers of their lives, trained by the very female soldiers who had come here to put their guns down. Contradictions at Nineteen, as in life, were everywhere. There were no easy explanations. The staccato bursts of gunfire here were no different than the clucking of chickens or laughter of children. They were accepted. Part of the routine.
And the founder of all this, of Nineteen and everything it encompassed, was the old woman who lived apart from everyone else and spent much of her days scanning newspapers from all over the world. Her cottage was the only one featuring a screened-in porch. Instead of stairs leading up to the entrance, it had a ramp for her wheelchair. A pair of neat grooves were worn into either side. The wrought-iron table had been set beneath a tree in front of the cottage, and it was here that the wheelchair rested most of the day.
“Can we get you anything?” one of the guards asked after approaching tentatively when the old woman had remained still for too long.
The old woman, half-blind in one eye, her head crowned by a cloud of silver hair, adjusted the blanket over her useless legs and spun her wheelchair so it faced the table. Her hand shakily grasped her glass of mint iced tea and drew it to her lips.
“No,” she answered, placing her other liver-spotted hand atop the pile of newspapers just brought her. “Leave me.”
The guard reslung her Galil machine gun over her shoulder and backed off. It was hers and another’s day to watch over the old woman, and this was not a task any on the kibbutz took lightly. Some knew her name, but not many. Her daily chores consisted of nothing more than going over her newspapers, in search of what, nobody knew.
The old woman set her unfinished glass of tea down and began paging through her papers in the same deliberate fashion as always, while her two guards continued their silent vigil. Had the guards been watching the old woman more closely, they would have seen her lean forward when she came upon an article on page one of the Wednesday New York Times headlined “Exiled Island Leader Javier Kelbonna Slain in Bizarre Execution.”
Her hand trembled as she rapidly turned through the front section of the paper to where the article was continued. She flipped quickly through another two newspapers before an article on the fourth page of the German daily froze her. An industrialist named Friedrich Von Tike had been found murdered last night in his office.
Bizarre circumstances again.
When she moved on to the Tuesday edition of The Times, there was no need to turn the pages at all. What she sought was right there at the top of page one: a picture of Ruben Oliveras placed just beneath the headlines on the bottom half of the page: “Reputed Drug Lord, Guards, Slain in Chicago Stronghold.”
“No,” she muttered, too softly for her guards to hear. “No! …” Louder this time, loud enough to make them turn.
The old woman brushed the entire contents of the wrought-iron table to the ground in a single swipe. Her glass of mint iced tea smashed on impact, dousing the discarded papers and making her guards go rigid.
“It can’t be,” she moaned. “They’ve come back. God help us all, they’ve come back!”
Chapter 11
“Sayin Hazelhurst!”
Kamir’s call stirred Melissa Hazelhurst from her stuporous vigil before the video monitor.
“There is a jeep approaching, Sayin Hazelhurst!”
Melissa rose stiffly and emerged from the cover of the canopy down in the excavation. “How many men?” she called up to Kamir.
“Just a driver,” Kamir returned, hands cupped before his mouth to make sure he could be heard.
She swallowed hard. “Make sure all the men are at their posts. I’m coming up.”
Two of the men, though, had run off following the death of her father, leaving only seven in Kamir’s replacement team.
Melissa had spent much of last night and all of Wednesday perched on a stool set behind the nine-inch video monitor. The recording made by the camera in her father’s headpiece would have been considered brilliant under ordinary circumstances given the available light. But these were hardly ordinary circumstances, and Melissa found it little better than useless.